Thursday, August 10, 2006

Wherein the daddies at the Post explain the Truth to us

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's decision to move forward with an independent candidacy after his loss in the Democratic primary is a controversial choice but in this circumstance the correct one. The leaders of Mr. Lieberman's party lined up yesterday to endorse Ned Lamont, the political newcomer who rode a wave of antiwar fervor to upset the incumbent senator. That's not surprising: After all, Democratic voters selected Mr. Lamont to represent them. And as weak a competitor as the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, may be, those leaders have to worry that Mr. Lamont and Mr. Lieberman would split the vote and make way for Mr. Schlesinger or a replacement. (The state's popular Republican governor, M. Jodi Rell, has called on Mr. Schlesinger to step aside.)

...therefore, Mr. Lamont, the winner of the primary, should step aside for the good of the party. And what the hell does Rell's comment about Schlesinger have to do with anything here, anyways?

But the critical question facing voters in November, as opposed to party leaders now, is who would make the better senator -- which is why we welcome Mr. Lieberman's decision to remain in the race. He would be, by far, the better choice for the people of Connecticut.

We're aware of your endorsement, but as I recall, there was a big election on Tuesday where the Democratic voters of CT thought otherwise.

We are not among those who differ substantially with Mr. Lieberman on Iraq, but we recognize the widespread anger over the conduct of the war and wish Mr. Lieberman had done a better job, earlier in the campaign, of articulating his position and emphasizing his differences with President Bush. In reality, he has been offering sharp but constructive criticism since early in the war. If he had made that clearer -- and if he had run a more organized, more tightly disciplined campaign -- Mr. Lieberman might not have found himself in this unhappy predicament, only the fourth incumbent senator in the past quarter-century to lose a primary.

Let's review: he lost not because he's been the bipartisan fig leaf for the Republicans on an elective, poorly conceived and tragically excuted war, and impugned the character of Democrats who would dare to disagree with the President; not because he's willing to trash the rule of law in the Schaivo case for the purposes of imposing his own authoritarian values on life-and-death decisions; not because he was the only New England democrat to support the disasterous energy policy foisted on the American people; and not because CT residents who happened not to live in New Haven haven't seen or heard from him in years. It's because he didn't sell himself effectively.

...

The turnout in Connecticut was a record for a primary in the state, a healthy development and a measure of the intensity this election is generating. But the almost 300,000 who voted still represented a minority of the electorate; in 1998, the last nonpresidential election year that a Connecticut senatorial seat was up for grabs, close to 1 million voters came to the polls. We hope that the broader electorate will choose to return Mr. Lieberman to the Senate -- the best outcome for the state, the country, and, yes, even the Democratic Party.

So unless all registered Democrats turned out and all others intending to vote in the fall election switched parties to vote in the primary, well, it really doesn't count. By the same reasoning, of course, none of the elections held in recent (and I'm sure in distant) memory are valid, nor should they be taken as an index of the will of the people.

Authoritarian fuckwitticisms, top to bottom, and even more so than we've come to expect from the Post. We can only hope The Washington Post Co. and the WaPo editorial board drive themselves into bankruptcy helping to fund Loserman's illegitimate campaign.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

They're daddies. They don't believe in democracy.

That means that the Post editorial page has trouble with the concept in theory and in action. It starts from the assumption that its opinion matters, by definition. It continues with a reluctance to accept the outcomes of democratic processes.

But it's consistent. It's usually wrong about Washington locally as well as nationally. It's national and international reporting is spotty. It's editorial page alternates between safe and wrong opinions on every subject, from local to international.

So now it thinks it has something important to say about Connecticut. Here's my advice for the people of that great state, whose Democrats have just made a choice: Do like we do down in D.C. and just don't listen.